Notwithstanding considerable advances, the establishment of the complete primary structure of a protein remains to a large extent a slow, manual procedure requiring skilled operators. It is thus an expensive undertaking and human operators are singularly ill-suited to the sort of tedious repetitive functions which constitute the procedure. It is therefore proposed to design, build and develop a machine capable of taking a sample of a pure protein, breaking it up into peptides, separating the peptides, and repeating the purification of each fragment until purity is achieved as judged from the stoichiometry of its amino acid composition, determining the sequence of each peptide by some form of repetitive Edman degradation from the NH2-terminal end, and finally collate and classify the total evidence to yield the complete amino acid sequence together with the experimental evidence employed for arriving at that sequence. Ideally, the system will be entirely self-contained and all on-line decisions will be taken by the controlling computer. Such a system would have extremely wide and fundamental biological and biomedical applications, as the cost per residue will be drastically reduced, the time required for sequence determination will be measured in days rather than months, and the overall size of pure protein sample needed is likely to be at least an order of magnitude smaller than for manual procedures. For several months, the members of the Departments of Biological Sciences, Chemical Engineering, Computer Sciences, Electrical Engineering, and the Design and Development Center of the University listed below as investigators, reduced all chemical procedures envisaged to their logical outline and various mechanical, electronic and control options were considered. It became the informed opinion of the group that the machine proposed above can indeed be built and made as foolproof as necessary to provide reliable operation.